Volume 24 Number 12 - December 2017

Features

December is the last hurrah for deer hunters in North Carolina and South Carolina. If they haven’t taken a trophy yet, their chances are steadily but surely slipping away with only a few weeks left in the season.

Jennings Rose launched his 18-foot boat from a private ramp near Hobucken, N.C., with a smaller boat ­— a one-man layout boat — strapped securely to its bouncing bow. Nosing into the wind, he left the protective waters of a small creek, heading into Pamlico Sound for a day of duck hunting.

The Last Hurrah, the Final Countdown, the Fourth Quarter. Call it what you want; the late deer season is here. It’s a time when, statistically speaking, more than half the people who hold big-game hunting licenses have decided that doing something else, anything else, is better than sitting in a deer stand.

Nearly every winter, it seems that when the holiday season approaches, the weather takes a turn for the warm. And when Butch and Chris Foster of Yeah Right Charters hear there is a zero chance of a white Christmas at their Southport, N.C., home, they head out to catch speckled trout.

Like many of my generation I cut my teeth in the outdoors hunting squirrels along creeks and pastures. I will always remember my first successful hunt, sitting under a large cedar tree near an old abandoned farm house, motionless, imagining the family that used to call this place home, daydreaming of children playing under the tree, of chickens scratching for food and fields of cotton, corn and vegetables where giant trees now stand.

Gone are the days when catfish were delegated to warm weather and water for consistent fishing. With the introduction of blue catfish into many lakes and rivers in the Carolinas, the cold-weather catfishing game has changed significantly.

Cody Fields of Antreville, S.C., took this 16-point, 160-inch non-typical buck in Abbeville County on Oct. 13. The buck weighed 200 pounds.